ARLINGTON, Va. — Since the war in Ukraine began, Yaroslav Pyzh, a Baptist pastor in Lviv, has worn many hats.
He heads the large and growing Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary, while overseeing a network of 18 humanitarian aid centers across the country. disputed country.
He has also become something of an ambassador for American evangelicals.
Several times a year he heads to the Polish border and once he is allowed to leave, he travels to the United States to preach about his country’s plight and the need for continued American support.
He is not alone in his plea. Over the past two years, Ukrainian Baptists and other evangelicals have continued to reach out to their American counterparts through coordinated campaigns and individual efforts. They’ve crisscrossed the U.S., visiting churches and Christian colleges, Capitol Hill and the Republican National Convention.
They appeal to American evangelicals who hold political sway within the Republican Party – an increasingly isolationist party with standard bearers who remain skeptical of Ukrainian aid.
“That war is a loser,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a recent podcast. His running mate, JD Vance, has said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.”
Gary Marx, a longtime U.S. conservative, is working with Ukrainian evangelicals to amplify their message — part of a $3.6 million contract between a Ukrainian organization and lobbying firm DCI Group, according to reports registration documents for foreign agents.
“(Ukrainians) know that the survival of their nation depends on the US supporting them,” Marx said. “It’s that simple. If the US withdraws its support, they cannot possibly survive.”
During his final U.S. trip, Pyzh made stops in at least eight states, including a meeting with Southern Baptist officials in Nashville, Tennessee.
Pyzh speaks English and has translated for American church groups visiting Ukraine. He received his doctorate from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas.
He is still a translator and moves between both countries.
“I serve as a bridge for both sides,” he told a gathering at a church in St. Louis in August.
He said he has American friends who have visited Ukraine many times and supported his ministries but are now torn.
“What I see in them is the struggle between what they want to do, the way they want to help us, and some of their ideas politically,” Pyzh said. “Their hearts are in Ukraine, but their minds are elsewhere.”
Ukraine is often called the ‘Bible Belt of Eastern Europe’. Although evangelicals make up only 2% to 4% of the population, that amounts to hundreds of thousands of people – a vibrant, influential religious presence. They have an outsized connection to a key constituency: Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with 13 million members.
Baptists from both countries appealed to Republicans Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson — a Southern Baptist and former denominational official — to support aid to Ukraine earlier this year, even as his party’s right flank threatened to oust him if he did so.
Pavlo Unguryan, a prominent Ukrainian Baptist leader, had met Johnson several times.
“We are brothers in one body of Jesus Christ,” said Unguryan, who once served in Ukraine’s parliament and leads the country’s National Prayer Breakfast.
After an attack in Odesa killed the daughter and grandson of a Baptist pastor, Unguryan arranged for the grieving son-in-law to meet Johnson just before the speaker helped push forward $61 billion in funding. aid in time of war to Ukraine.
While intelligence briefings may have given Johnson “the intellectual information about why it is in the U.S. interest to support Ukraine, our work and the work of others like us gave him the emotional and spiritual connection to Ukraine,” said Steven Moore, founder of the Ukrainian Freedom. Project. It helped finance Unguryan’s trips to the US.
Moore, a veteran Republican Hill staffer, founded the project in 2022. It has coordinated meetings with more than 100 congressional offices.
During the debate over aid to Ukraine, Moore’s organization placed digital ads in Johnson’s district. A billboard paid for by Razom was placed opposite Johnson’s church in Louisiana, according to a Ukrainian humanitarian group that Moore advised. It showed a damaged Ukrainian Baptist church and invoked the Bible’s book of Esther: “Speaker Johnson, for such a time as this.”
Moore’s organization also created a website with stories from Ukrainian Christians who claimed they had been tortured by Russians.
“Every day we try to figure out how to build and sustain Republican support for Ukraine,” Moore said. “And the evangelical Christian message is one of the ways we do that.”
This advocacy taps into a deep well of concern among Americans about religious freedom — something that is also a talking point used by Ukraine’s critics.
Russia has claimed that Ukraine is the one discriminating against Christians, especially since Ukraine a law passed seen as a target for the branch of the Orthodox Church historically linked to Moscow. The law bans religious groups that support the Russian invasion and groups linked to the Russian Orthodox Church, which supported Vladimir Putin in his efforts to conquer Ukraine.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has expressed concerns about the new Ukrainian law, but “stresses that Russia remains the greatest threat to religious freedom in Ukraine.”
“There is significantly less religious freedom and religious pluralism in Russia than in Ukraine,” said Catherine Wanner, a Penn State professor of history, anthropology and religious studies who focuses on the region.
Evangelicals face persecution and repression in Russia and the occupied territories, in part because of their faith’s perceived ties to the United States, Wanner said.
Russian authorities “assume that all evangelicals are American spies,” said Igor Bandura, senior vice president of the Ukrainian Baptist Union. He spoke to The Associated Press by phone from the outskirts of Kiev after a sleepless night hearing sirens and drones.
Hundreds of churches and religious sites were destroyed during the war. Bandura said that 110 of the 320 Ukrainian Baptist churches in the recently occupied Russian territories have ceased to exist because members have fled. “Those who have stayed are really under great, great pressure.”
Bandura visited the US in May and June on a trip coordinated by Marx’s DCI project. His itinerary included the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis, where he spent a lot of time outside the room talking to fellow Baptists about Ukraine.
Southern Baptist churches have a long history of missionary work in Ukraine. After the war began, SBC representatives voted to “stand in solidarity with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters.” The SBC’s humanitarian organization, Send Relief, says it has helped two million people in the region since 2022. Brent Leatherwoodhead of the SBC’s public policy department, has urged continued U.S. support for Ukraine.
In April, Daniel Darling, director of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Land Center for Cultural Engagement, signed an agreement letter with Pyzh and other prominent Baptists, urging Johnson to support aid to Ukraine.
“When I talk to Southern Baptist pastors — regular pastors — for the most part they really want Ukraine to have the upper hand,” Darling said. “Many of them have ties to missions there. And so I don’t think it’s as controversial as it often seems.”
Sitting in the parlor of a Virginia Baptist church outside Washington, Pyzh reiterated that he is grateful for the American support. He noted that millions of Ukrainians will be closely watching the US presidential election.
His seminary continues to adapt to the many needs that war brings.
It now has more than 1,300 students, with thousands more pursuing certificate programs. It recently launched a counseling program to address growing mental health needs. This year, for the first time, the incoming class includes recent war veterans, some of whom have been injured and released from military service.
Pyzh echoes other Ukrainian evangelicals when he says that for them this is a spiritual and an earthly war, waged for religious and political freedom.
“This is an existential struggle for us in a sense as a nation,” he said, “but also as Christians, as believers.”
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AP journalist Hanna Arhirova in Kiev, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
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